Dialogue with Death

Arthur Koestler

Read February 2005

The obituaries following Hunter Thompson's recent death discussed his
immersive style of journalism. But there is a long history of
immersive journalists, and some of the most prominent operated in the
early part of the 20th century: not merely witnesses to history, they
also tried their best to shape it. Koestler, who seems to have been
better than most at getting into the thick of action, was one of the
best exponents of this style (if we may call it that!).

This book is Koestler's account of life in a Spanish prison. As the
Civil War draws to a close, Koestler chooses to not evacuate from
Málaga. His earlier writings have put him in the sights of
Franco's subordinates, and Koestler is transferred to a central prison
where he remains in constant fear of his death. The book is partly a
journal and partly a historical reconstruction of his time in that
prison.

The best part of this book is Koestler's exploration of the psychology
of the prisoner. His attention to detail, and the terror he describes
from both the knocking on the door and the gunshots in the distance in
the middle of the night, are compelling in their credibility and
chilling in their presence. There are also vignettes, such as his
attempts to overcome the boredom and insanity of isolation by
deriving, of all things, the basic formulas of analytic geometry. At
its best, the book is a studythrough the agency of his own
minda person trying to understand his environment through only
limited powers of observation (why, when I call, do they not come
closer to my cell windows?). In that, he embodies all human search
for self-understanding.

Koestler wrote this book at the height of his partisanship. (Where
else, these days, will you read of someone being ``denounced''?) Two
decades later, he re-released the book with a preface explaining his
own dishonesty in elements of the accountan addition that was
undoubtedly a byproduct of his disillusion with the Left. The book
itself is left unchanged, however, which is just as well, for its
immediacy cannot be surpassed.